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4 August 2024

We crossed the Nullarbor Plain which is pretty big. After the Nullarbor we visited the Super Pit which is a big hole with big toys. That was followed by a big rock. Since then we have experienced torrential rain, hail, gale force winds, thunder and lightening. It really was a big storm. We are only exploring a small part of Western Australia which is so big it would encompass Texas four times over or all of Western Europe. So we are completely encapsulated by all things big.

In keeping with this theme we have recently visited the Jarrah and Karri forests. These are big trees and thankfully someone was thoughtful enough to preserve some of the remaining forests before they were all cut down. Many of these trees were used to build railways in India.

Now these might not be the biggest trees in the world and they do not compare to giant sequoias. They are however standout examples around here, especially after the Nullarbor.

One tree in particular was only saved by a forestry official who hopped into his buggy, rode out into the forest and blazed a government mark on the tree the night before it was to be cut down. And so we can all still see King Jarrah.

The towns that once relied on the forestry trade now rely on mountain bikers, hikers, canoeists, zip line enthusiasts, and tourists. The felling of these native old growth forests has come to end in time for future generations to be able to arch their necks back into impossible positions in order to see their full height.

Towering over the landscape they made perfect observation platforms for bush fires. However, rather than build a structurally sound staircase, a spiral of steel pegs was driven into the trunks. No safety cage, plenty of fresh air between the pegs and no non-slip surfaces. This was obviously built before work health and safety became a thing. Until recently climbing these trees was a challenge favoured by tourists. They are no longer used to spot bushfires.

A word of advice: New Zealand has the Kauri tree which is huge. Whilst it is pronounced the same as the Western Australian Karri do not ever suggest to a New Zealander they are the same tree. To do so would be verging on fighting words, just saying.

We are now in Albany and today we visited the ANZAC museum. It was from this harbour that Australia and New Zealand sent convoys of ships with a total of 41,000 of their finest young men to WWI. We were fortunate to see the name of our great uncle on the honour roll. He left Australia from this point in November 1914 and died at Gallipoli in May 1915.

The eastward journey is rapidly approaching but we still have some time left in the west.

31 July 2024

There comes a time on all long journeys when you realise something has changed. It could be the wind is no longer in your face but now on your back, the hill you are riding up has suddenly flattened out or maybe your sails have shifted. So it was at an intersection on the southern outskirts of Perth. We turned left and suddenly we were no longer heading west. Whilst we weren’t quite heading home that left turn signified we had now started a new phase of our journey.

The weather has deteriorated into a constant series of high winds and storms interspersed with brief periods of blue skies. It has been bucketing and blowing a gale which has made towing our caravan somewhat fraught.

We stayed in Busselton which brags it has the longest wooden jetty in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s a 3.8 km (2.25 miles) return, walk or train ride. Fortunately there is a brewery nearby so you can escape the rain squalls.

We visited Margaret River which is usually famous for its wine and amazing surf. Again the weather was the major obstacle to enjoying either. That said the weather coming in from the Indian Ocean has created some amazing waves and ocean vistas.

We have reached the bottom, left hand corner of Australia. To the west is Africa and to the south Antartica. This is where oceanographers have decided the Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean meet. We could not see a dividing line but we accepted the authority of the sign.

We also came across some unusual sights.

It was thought lighthouses would be a good idea in this part of the world given it is the first rocky bit after sailing west from the Cape of Good Hope. The Cape Leeuwin and Cape Naturaliste lights are still operational after over a hundred years of operation although now fully automated and with LED lights.

I have to chuckle when you read the history of these lights. WA asked the eastern colonies for a financial contribution to their construction. The logic being ships sailing to Melbourne or Sydney would rely on these navigation beacons. The eastern colonies refused the offer. To this day WA has neither forgiven nor forgotten this slight and so the east west rivalry continues. As I am a sure my readers are aware the Australian constitution addressed this anomaly by making all lighthouses a federal responsibility.

Tomorrow we are off to tall timber country.

25 July 2024

Having left the big hole we are now scrambling over a big rock. It seems everything is Western Australia is big.

This rock is not only big but it’s very old at 2.7 billion years old. That’s about 5 times older than Uluṟu, 50 times older than the Himalayas, and 30 times older than the Rocky Mountains. Fortunately it doesn’t contain gold for if it did it would have been blown up and dug up years ago. It would now be just another big hole.

It turns out some of the oldest rocks in the world are found in WA some over 4 billion years old!

We have been driving through the wheat belt and you guessed it, they grow a lot of wheat here. The country is flat and the farms are big. Again with the big. In fact the farms out here are huge and since we have had so much rain these fields are bright green unlike the Nullarbor Plain.

We have turned up a little early in the season. WA is renowned for the display of wildflowers in the spring especially after a wet winter. We are in the wet bit but not the Spring bit. It’s been raining here for the past week and there is more rain coming.

Today we drove through forests and there were hills. What a change but still lots of mining. We have now travelled through bauxite, gold, lithium and nickel country.

We have nearly reached the coast and the Indian Ocean. That will be a new ocean to paddle our feet in.

Final comment; it’s obvious who has been travelling the outback recently. Mud caked cars and trucks are everywhere; on the highways, in towns and in the campgrounds. These cars and caravans are completely decorated in thick red mud covering wheels, windows and licence plates. It seems there are two seasons out here, one of mud and the other dust.

23 July 2024

It’s been 10 years since I started recording my travel ramblings. These stories have been inspired by locations all over Australia along with more exotic places like India, SE Asia, China, South America and Europe. Hopefully interesting destinations will continue to unfold on future travels.

We are now in Kalgoorlie in the West Australian gold fields. Everything here is big, from the size of the hole in the ground, more commonly referred to as the Super Pit, to the size of the trucks hauling the rock out of the hole, through to the amount of gold that is produced from the Super Pit. Even the distances you have to travel to get here are huge.

The huge dump trucks carry a load of about 240 tonnes. That’s the equivalent to 175 4WD utes or light trucks. They use 4500 litres of diesel each day and cost over $1.2 million. The training course to become a driver takes 6 months. The mine has 40 of these trucks in the Super Pit and has just ordered another 40 brand new trucks. It seems there is money to be made in gold.

What I find most intriguing or maybe it’s just an expression of humankind’s fascination with the yellow stuff is that a large percentage of the gold mined goes back underground, in vaults. That’s after all the effort find it, to dig it up, grind up the rock and to refine it into little blocks. These little bricks are then forever stored away. Gold has little use except for its perceived value or for jewellery. But it sure does keep a lot of people employed from those that build and maintain the trucks through to the geologists, engineers, truck drivers, explosives experts and the list goes on. That’s before we get to those that turn it into jewellery or store it away in banks. Amazing.

In days gone by the golden mile was mined by a myriad of small companies, via underground mines. This meant a huge population of miners living in Kalgoorlie resulting in a large number of hotels and a street dedicated to brothels. The Super Pit amalgamated all those mines into one massive and highly efficient enterprise. This has meant the end of the brothels and many of the hotels. Kalgoorlie is now a town of families and in contrast to the past, 50% of the mine workforce are women.

We continue heading west toward the coast and today for the first time in many days we saw green fields.

17 July 2024

We have finally crossed the Nullarbor Plain where phone and internet connection is doubtful and where every fuel stop is a must. The Nullarbor is about 1100 km wide (684 miles) and no connection to the outside world is my excuse for not publishing this earlier.

In our travels we have learned about a courageous job in the tuna industry. The modern method for catching tuna is to use huge nets to enclose a school of the fish and to then tow that school back to holding pens where the fish are fattened for the Japanese market.

Now sharks like to jump up and into these nets or alternatively chew holes in the nets through which they enter to eat the tuna. To address this problem the tuna boats have divers on board who dive into the freezing water to then gently coax the sharks back out through the holes they created. It seems as the sharks swim in circles within the nets they become sluggish and docile, well that’s what the job ads say. Amazing but not a job for me.

The Nullarbor Plain is a place of wide open and empty spaces. One of the longest sections of straight road in the world crosses the Nullarbor. This is a place where you acknowledge all other drivers with a subtle wave and where a 2 way radio is almost mandatory. The road train drivers appreciate a word from you when the road is clear so they can pass.

Here the road can be a runway for aircraft especially the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Wide loads are common and when you hear a radio call with the words ‘we have an eight coming up’ that means a wide load 8 metres wide (24 feet) is coming your way and you need to get out of its way. We pulled over as far as we safely could and yet there still didn’t seem to be enough room for the two of us.

We stopped for a coffee and to refuel and to our surprise there in the coffee shop was a piece of Skylab. For those who weren’t around at the time Skylab was a NASA space station that fell out of its orbit back in 1979. I recall at the time the local council tried to charge NASA with a fine for littering. The coffee shop had all sorts of Skylab bits on display.

The Nullarbor is bounded by the Great Australian Bight which is where Australia separated from Gondwana about 50 million years ago. This separation created amazing clifftop camp sites from where you can watch whales, loose your drone or sit back and enjoy a wine as you contemplate the vastness of the Southern Ocean.

We are now in gold mining country. This is a place of very big holes in the ground and highly paid jobs in mining. More in the next log.

8 July 2024

It’s been a while since I last wrote and whilst there have been many adventures since my last musings there has not been one big event that motivated an article in its own right. That has now changed we are on the road again, this time for a couple of months.

Over the past many months we have travelled to Queensland and down to Victoria. We have visited gin distilleries in remote valleys in the hills, liquorice and chocolate factories in small country towns and railway museums in what were once bustling towns.

We have followed Google map directions into some remote areas, so empty there were street signs for shearing sheds. There was even a town with a hand painted basket ball court in the main street. Now that’s a quiet town.

It is sad to see what were once bustling country towns reduced to empty shells with antique shops and government agencies filling the old buildings. The pubs no longer filled with men at the end of their working day. The end of steam trains along with highly mechanised agriculture and bigger farms has brought these towns to an inevitable decline. Ignoring the obvious value in visiting a gin distilleries, many of these towns do have a history to tell from Devonian fish fossils through to WWII amphibious aircraft training. You’re just never sure what surprises the next town has to offer, and maybe it’s just the quality of their homemade meat pies.

We have discovered winter isn’t a great time for travel which just goes to show you are never too old to learn something new. That said we were kind of suspicious that camping in winter might be a challenge, and so it is. Regardless we are on our way west and will in a few days tackle the emptiness of the Nullarbor Plain as we head towards Western Australia. Stay tuned…

15 October 2023

The big news! We won the meat raffle at the Nicco pub. We haven’t won a meat tray in years and it’s great to see this Australian tradition living on in the local pubs. We won’t be on starvation rations for at least a few days.

We are determined to ride some of the amazing rail trails in Victoria. It’s just a matter of logistics and questions of how to get back to the car after a one way ride.

This question was solved yesterday when we rode from Nicholson to Bruthen a distance of 21 kms and then I rode back to get the car. That was after a refreshing coffee and egg and bacon roll.

We shifted our camp to Bruthen and planned today’s ride to Nowa Nowa. This time we came up with a different strategy. We rode to the half way point and then we both rode back to collect the van. The first half going out was all uphill but riding back 22kms was a great joy as it was all downhill.

We drove to Nowa Nowa for lunch and then rode back to out to the mid point and then returned to camp. This ride was again up hill all the way out and a great down hill run back to town. Just as well it was downhill as we were both pretty tired, completing 50kms in the day. There was a time when a 50km ride was a short ride but those days are back in the mists of time.

No cars, very few other cyclists, no snakes and just one rider and her horse. Sunshine, no rain and only a slight breeze. A perfect riding day and tonight a good night’s sleep will be enjoyed by all. Tomorrow looks like rain.

12 October 2023

It’s been a few months since we have been on the road and apart from a few short excursions we have stayed home over winter. That all changed with a trip to visit to an old friend who was celebrating the anniversary of his birth 3 score and 10 years ago.

After the celebrations we hit the road to discover new places and maybe fit in some bike rides on rail trails. With no plans we followed roads through towns we had not visited previously but with a destination in mind.

Our first day was to take us to Wilsons Prom, a national park in Victoria. The park includes the most southerly point of the Australian mainland. It includes some amazing beaches and remote bush land.

From the Tidal River campground we travelled west to the Gippsland lakes area to explore some of the rail trails. Along the way we discovered why this part of the country is so green – it rains a lot.

This part of Australia forms the first interruption of the weather coming up from the southern ocean (apart from Tasmania) so it blows and it rains.

We also discovered that during the off season travel destinations take the opportunity to upgrade or renovated their facilities. And so the general store was closed and there was no cafe to provide espresso coffees. The nearest town or at least a shop was a 2 hour round trip away. That meant we did the pioneer thing and checked what supplies we had left and decided what meals we could manage and how long we could survive without any wine. I know, serious stuff but we pulled it off.

Apart from the walks in the bush and along the coast the high point of this part of the trip was a boat ride along the coast in a amphibious vessel designed and built for this beach. They have three of these unique vessels which they drive down onto the beach and into the surf where they retract the wheels and hit the throttle on the outboard motors.

This boat tour took in the most southerly point of continental Australia, some whales, a seal colony which stinks and the famous skull rock. It turns out a TV crew some years ago used a helicopter and then abseiled into the cave in the rock only to find a Portuguese canon ball from the 1700s.

From here we are off to explore more rail trails and to enjoy the bush on our bikes and away from busy roads.

10 July 2023

We were at Barcelona airport with a 5 hour wait when I started this final log. Unfortunately the WiFi network was too slow so I find myself finishing this article from home and after our long flight home.

Some final reflections on this trip.

Our last tour was of Parc Guell, our last Gaudi site. A long day involving about 20kms of walking. We celebrated our last day with probably the best paella we have had on this trip, not to mention the steamed mussels and a cocktail at a Peruvian bar.

Final thoughts:

Travel without a smart phone is as likely as travel without a passport. It can’t be done. We have used our phone to book tours and to receive the electronic ticket. Audio tours for many attractions are delivered via an app. Boarding passes can be electronic and you are invited to check in via your phone 24 hours before boarding. Even the menu during your flight is provided via WiFi. A local SIM with at least data is the bare minimum.

Google maps are invaluable for negotiating your way around. I also used the location tag in a photo to find our way back to a restaurant. We had walked forever until I realised I had a photo of the place that would give us location details.

Use a smart phone to take photos in the most discrete way possible. They will also upload to the Cloud so no photos are lost even if you lose your phone / camera.

The Mediterranean diet is amazing. We have not been disappointed with any meal and the quality of the seafood is outstanding. I don’t know where they get such large fish particular the sole and sea bass. The mussels, prawns, langoustines, lobster, clams, octopus and squid were amazing.

There are too many high points to try to list them all however jumping off the back of a boat and swimming to shore where a sumptuous seafood meal was served under the trees has got to be up there.

I watched as a fisherman carried one of the largest lobsters I have seen out of his boat and up the quayside. Our friend approached the nearest restaurant and asked that we have that lobster for dinner. It fed five of us.

The Sagrada Familia is overwhelming and maybe one day I will see the finished building. It’s been under construction for about 140 years and they no longer provide an expected completion date. That’s a smart decision by the project manager.

A constant disappointment is about public bathrooms and this is regardless of the country you are visiting. If you are looking for a WC or loo, follow the signs and then look for a group of men sitting on park benches waiting. Nearby will be a long line of women and there you will find the public facilities. Yet again a failure in systems engineering.

It’s amazing that Mallorca and Barcelona are at about the same degree of latitude north as Tasmania is south. But do not think for a moment the climate of the Med comes close to that of Tasmania. The waters of the Med are crystal clear and warm, the climate mild to hot; just perfect.

Final comment, if you are thinking about travel and are wondering about whether people are wearing masks, well, they aren’t. We have hardly seen a mask on the planes or in the street. The world is back and open for travel!

5 July 2023

There are all sorts of warnings about pick pockets and how to protect yourself but these guys are good at what they do. It was a weekend train ride on the Metro and our friend had no idea his wallet had been lifted until he went to find his train ticket. No train ticket and no wallet.

Two 20€ purchases had been made at a supermarket within minutes and before our friend had called his bank to cancel the card. The purchases were small enough that a password wasn’t required.

We are now hyper vigilant and only carry a travel card and rail ticket.

Enough of the dark side to travel. Our last few days have been spent exploring Barcelona and visiting Gaudi buildings. My awareness of Gaudi’s was naive to say the least. After visiting three of his buildings, Sagrada Familia, Casa Batllo and La Pedrera I have some appreciation of this man’s talent. I can only imagine the criticism he would have attracted 100 years ago with such radical designs supported by architectural innovation unheard of at the time.

The basilica Sagrada Familia is still under construction 120 years after work started. From the outside it is an imposing masonry structure, inside it is a massive open area full of light and colour. Maybe I will see the completed building in some years to come.

Casa Batllo and La Pedrera were designed as homes or apartments for families. They are filled with organic shapes and spaces inspired by nature.

In all three sites the one challenge you face is finding that opportunity to take that photograph without another human in view. It can be done but it’s not easy.

In Palma and Barcelona we have come across large groups of African men selling their wares in the street. They display their goods on large sheets laid out on the footpath. Many of the goods are football emblazoned clothing and designer products. What is fascinating is that when the police arrive the African sellers are able to fold up their displays in seconds and vanish down into the Metro. Just as quickly they reappear and are back open for business as soon as the police leave. It all seems to be a game. At night the sellers appear to bed down in the entrances to the Metro.

Just when you think you have worked out the extensive Barcelona Metro they change the rules. There are lots of announcements but they are all in Spanish so you go on your merry way until you reach a barricade and discover ‘your’ line is closed for maintenance. You are now faced with the challenge of plotting a new course on unfamiliar Metro lines, getting on and off at different stations all the while being vigilant about pick pockets. It’s time to celebrate when you get to your destination or return to the apartment at the end of the day.

We are close to the end of this trip with one more Gaudi site to visit and then the plane home tomorrow.